Customer relationship: 5 soft skills to master as a freelancer

How to talk about freelance and business collaboration without talking about customer relationships? To find missions and build customer loyalty, a freelancer will necessarily need to develop his relational skills. In fact, initial exchanges are crucial to determine the quality of future collaboration. Consequently, the self-employed have every interest in developing certain Soft Skills to guarantee the success of their future collaborations. Which ones do you need to master to optimize the management of your customer relationship? We have identified 5 of them, to be discovered in this article.

Summary

1. Communication

2. Adaptability

3. Emotional intelligence

4. Problem solving

5. Collective intelligence

1. Communication

This competence, the basis of any successful collaboration, is obvious but it is not always so well mastered. Do you know how to reassure a customer who expresses doubts to you? Are you regularly forced to rephrase your words or do you only need a few words to be understood by a customer? In other words, being talkative is not enough to know how to communicate well.

Communication includes a set of components that make it possible to effectively transmit information to the interlocutor. Linguists mainly count five of them:

• linguistics: master the subtleties of the language, understand the subtleties and the possible double meanings that could lead to confusion
• referential: understand who you are talking to in order to transmit the right information to the appropriate interlocutor
• sociolinguistics: knowing how to interpret a person's social category in order to use the right level of language and avoid blunders
• sociocultural: perceive possible cultural differences in order to adapt your speech in order to transmit an idea by adapting to the way in which you perceive a situation
• strategic: choose the words that will be the most striking or adopt the right posture to create a positive image for him, especially in the context of an interview where you have to convince a potential customer

These indicators make it possible to identify the components that you already know. For example, if you have just joined a company where teams communicate in another language, you may have difficulty understanding the subtleties of language, despite your good level. On the other hand, you may be sufficiently familiar with environments with high political stakes and know how to identify the undertones that a top management director is not in a position to clarify in front of his team. The trick is to identify your shortcomings in order to work on them.

To develop it, you will therefore need to create new communication habits and to confront these environments that put you in difficulty. If a customer does not use the same terms as you to talk about the same subject, it will be useful for you to identify this discrepancy to clarify what they are talking about. This competence is used to promote mutual understanding in order to make collaboration as smooth as possible.

2. Adaptability

As a self-employed person, you are more frequently required to change your working environment. It is therefore important to know how to be adaptable when you are going to start a new mission. In fact, you will not only change the interlocutor: the corporate culture, his values, the team personalities, the problematic And the nature of the project, internal organization and working methods are all parameters to take into account for each new collaboration.

But in fact, how will adaptability help you manage your customer relationship? You are expected to have a certain flexibility and an ability to share your point of view, in order to participate actively in the project (sometimes beyond the simple prerequisites of the mission). But the customer also expects you to take into account his vision and methodology, in order to receive solutions adapted to his situation. If necessary, you should therefore be able to adjust your priorities and suggestions to collaborate effectively.

As a freelancer, you also need to be comfortable with instability. You will be particularly challenged in your ability to adapt to new work environments or partners with whom to collaborate. As a business manager, you will have to learn different tasks in the exercise of your freelance activity: legal, strategic or Finances. During your prospecting, your adaptability will also be an advantage in optimizing your research and your approach.

So cultivate your spirit of challenge, strengthen your knowledge, experiment on the ground while learning to be comfortable with “failures”.

3. Emotional intelligence

To promote all the chances of success of your future (and current) collaborations, you will not be able to ignore emotions. You must actually know how to identify your own emotions and it will be just as useful for you to be able to perceive those of your interlocutors, to understand them and to know how to react to them. How can you build a relationship, professional as it may be, without taking into account the reactions of your peers?

Even if emotions are generally not valued in the professional environment, no one is spared from these sometimes embarrassing reactions. It is possible to ignore them, to detach themselves from them, but they are indeed there. Your emotional intelligence therefore becomes a competitive asset.

This skill allows you to:

• understand and navigate with your emotions, as well as those of others
• Know how to listen to and identify essential information without being polluted by emotion
• be able to relate harmoniously with peers, avoiding ego conflicts
• share your opinion at the right time, in a constructive and neutral way
• build strong enough relationships that are not likely to deteriorate over time

This skill is particularly useful if you are on a mission in a stressful environment or when it is necessary to participate in politics. If you have the cards in hand to understand your emotions, you will have all the skills you need to avoid being overwhelmed by stress. Conversely, you will be able to listen and you will have the ability to verbalize the emotions of the other person in case of conflict.

While this skill is useful for specific situations, it is also essential for maintaining your professional relationships. What could be more satisfying than finding the right words to convince a prospect to sign a quote, earning the trust of a customer who feels understood, or even simply making a customer laugh?

4. Problem solving

Good customer relationship management also involves anticipating more complex eventualities, such as conflict situations. While some collaborations may seem more delicate than others, it is necessary to know how to put words to them in order to find and implement appropriate solutions. But problem solving is more than just the ability to manage conflict. It is also a highly valued skill for solving a given problem and managing to identify concrete solutions.

For companies, this competence is the guarantee of an analytical mind, a tendency to critical and creative thinking, an ability to find solutions and to adapt one's point of view according to a given context. In other words, this skill positions you as an expert of choice.

Regardless of your level of expertise, you will necessarily need this skill. From a strategic and operational point of view, you will benefit from knowing how to identify your client's problem, the dysfunctions it causes within the team and its origins in order to find solutions adapted to the budget and the technical and human resources available. In the context of a merger of two companies, how to reorganize the teams, especially among the hierarchical positions? What will be the main steps of this transformation to promote the merger into a single entity? If you want to set up a new CRM to better exploit your database, which one are you going to focus on and how are you going to install it? What initiatives are you going to propose to facilitate its handling?

Your intervention will be welcome insofar as you already have the expertise to define the blocking points, put your finger on the root of the problem and build a personalized action plan.

5. Collective intelligence

As a freelancer, it is often essential to work in a team. If your personal objective is indeed to generate turnover, you will nevertheless intervene on a more collective project to provide your expertise. Each of your missions responds, in fact, to the request of a customer. While some jobs promote, in fact, a more solitary achievement, you will mostly be required to collaborate at least with the client company's project team.

However, collective intelligence is not an easy skill to acquire. Unlike the previous four skills, this one doesn't just involve your will alone. You should also take into account the other collaborators on the team. Thus, knowing how to work in a team implies knowing how to take advantage of the potential and uniqueness of each person, to know how to put difficulties into perspective, to be able to communicate one's limits and to identify those of others or to listen and participate actively throughout the duration of the collaboration.

Apart from short missions, you will often have to collaborate with the members of the project team, in order to inform you of all the parameters of the mission or to understand the overall context, for that matter. This therefore requires getting to know the team you are joining in order to collaborate more effectively.

For freelancers, soft skills are just as important as relational skills. Even if some jobs are less likely to require perfect mastery, self-employment status nevertheless requires these talents to learn a solid foundation. These skills impact the customer experience since they promote good understanding and the fluidity of information transmitted throughout the duration of a mission. It is not enough to do your job; it is just as crucial to acquire leadership. In general, you will be better able to understand your customers, better meet their needs and move from one mission to another with ease.